Akerou

It's strange that so few people know and appreciate this title. I read it two years ago and judging by the sales, it didn't really fly in Japan either. Probably precisely because it's intellectual and demanding, consequently betraying the expectations of the type of audience that approaches debut works of companies. Glad to see someone else enjoy this little hidden gem.

I've used to read vn's on my mac a couple times when I was on trips. I can't see why vm's wouldn't work. Both fusion and parallels are viable for this task. Also, an even easier option is to simply install Windows with bootcamp and switch to windows whenever you want to read (you can share the same data space, so there is no need to allocate that much drive space).

Well, there is no general way that perfectly works out for anyone. A lot of people claim mnemonics're the (only) way to go, but when I was learning kanji they slowed down my learning speed instead of helping me, so I just shifted back to brute forcing kanji the "classic" way. What I always tell people who ask me how to learn jp is, don't focus all too much on kanji because for some reason most people are convinced learning kanji = learning japanese. That's not really the case. You need kanji to read proper jp, yeah. It's also true that they're indispensable for the language and help you understand certain parts about the language, but they don't make you understand the language itself. So my advice is, learn kana, grap Genki I+II and learn the basic grammar. There're so many translators (especially fansubers) that somehow seem to lack an understanding of basic grammatical structures so that I can't help myself but wonder how in the world they learned jp. I mean stuff like apparently not knowing that verbs that take を as the obj marker can take both を or が when used in their potential forms, leading to translators mixing up object and subject..... Understanding that basic grammar is the fundament upon which one should build everything else. Also, jp is a context based language, making experience with the language all the more important. Honestly, I know guys that freaking graduated with japanese as their major and when you set a vn/ln script before them and told them to translate a couple of lines of it, it was horrifying. That's what happens when people are stuck in a world of text books without encountering "real" japanese. So the key is (to my mind at least) to start confronting "real japanese" as soon and frequent as possible. That means learn the basic grammar, brute force the 500 most frequently used kanji (or use mnemonics, whatever works for you) and begin to read vn's with fairly low language levels. You may also want to stop watching anime with subtitles. What I also found to be pretty helpful is writing jp essays on a regular basis (once a week or so). Oh, and something that I can't emphasize enough is that you should avoid using jp->en dicts as much as you can. As soon as you've built a solid fundament, start relying on jp->jp dicts/explanations (eg. weblio, kotobank, zokugo-dict etc.) and if there're grammatical structures/idioms you don't get and you can't find anything on the mentioned sites, just ask some jp people at http://oshiete.goo.ne.jp/ , http://sooda.jp/ etc. to explain to you, that's better than anything else.